Vistalite Fonts

by Andy Youell

I've been collecting Vistalite promotional material for some time now - it's cheaper, quieter and far easier to store than the drums themselves.

Vistalites are one of those quintessentially 70's things - a bit like flared trousers and disco music. Vistalites were up to date and the Ludwig promotional material reflected this in the choice of layout, colours and font.

The 1973 launch brochure included the debut of the new Vistalite logo. This basically involved the word 'VISTALITE' written in a font made up of 5-lines in varying thicknesses in varying shades of blue. In the style of the classic 'pump' fonts, corners on the 'A', 'L' and 'E' were curved and the whole thing was kerned to bring the letters together.

This logo forms the basis of the banner you see at the top of this page. The extra letters "S.COM" were cunningly carved out of the existing logo. The whole thing was re-sized and cleaned up to result in the logo for this site.

The price list that accompanied the 1973 launch brochure featured a large circular logo, incorporating the Vistalite text and the standard Ludwig logo. The magazine adverts of the time only carried the standard Ludwig logo with Vistalite spelt out in a standard typeface.

The 1975 Ludwig catalogue, published in 1974, included a variation on the original Vistalite text. The font is very similar with its mixture of thick and thin lines, though both the 'V' and the 'S' are significantly different. This is odd when you consider that....

.....the 1975 "Stripe Up The Band" advertisments (marking the launch of the Rainbow Vistalites) reverted to the original format of the Vistalite logo.

The 1975 Rainbow Vistalite brochure included yet another variation on the multi-line font theme.

Later material loses the font altogether. Both the 1976 and 1980 catalogues list Vistalites but with no specific font effects.